War In Heaven

What is the attraction of a good war novel? That question can have many answers for manypeople. Some, I suppose, like to read about themovements and actions of armies, perhapsimagining themselves as greatgenerals leadingtens ofthousands ofMongol warriorsacross the steppe– or sufferingalong with thepoor footsoldiers atVerdun whomust slogthrough all themud, bullets andblood. Some,perhaps, take avicarious thrillin killing or insurviving beingkilled. War hasalwaysfascinated me for two main reasons: first,because it is so horrible and insane it seemsimpossible that human beings should be able towage war at all. And second, because it bringsout both the absolute best and the absolute worstin us. It also reveals something very deep aboutthe nature of reality. The more levels of strife awar novel depicts, the more it reveals.

InWar In Heaven, I wanted many differentconflicts to play out: Danlo vs. Hanuman;the Old Order vs. the New Order; the OldChurch vs. a new psychedelic/cyberneticreligion; gods vs. gods; nature vs. artificiallife; the entire universe at war with itself.

Any war I would ever write about mustwind up being a spiritual war, for whatconcerns me most is the fierce struggle weall fight inside our souls. It says this in theBhagavad Gita:

There is a war that opensthe doors of Heaven.Glad are the heroeswhose fate is to fight such a war.

Danlo, at first, can’t quite accept that hemust fight the battle to become an asaryaalongside the sickening violence of arealwar. He should never even get near a war,he who has taken a vow of ahimsa to harmno living thing. And so when war breaksupon Neverness and the Civilized Worlds,even as it flashes like lightning deep insidethe tissues of his being, he feels anythingbut glad.

He soon finds himself at the very center ofthis war to determine the fate of theuniverse. He returns to Neverness at aterrible time: in only a few more years, thedestroying light from the exploding starswill fall upon the city and its planet, killingall life. Already, killing has come toNeverness. A bomb annihilates thehydroponic food factories; people firelasers at each other and fight in the streets.The whole city, locked in the ice of winter,cut off from stars by fleets of battlingwarships, begins to starve.

I once read an account of the hard timesthat befell Stalingrad during its siege by theGerman army. No bloodier battle havehuman beings so far fought, for two millionmen, women and children died in its bomb-blasted buildings and frozen streets. Manystarved there, too. Some turned tocannibalism, scavenging the bodies of thedead. The worst of these man-eaters luredpeople to dark apartments with the promiseof food to be had, with no questions asked.They murdered the clandestine shoppers,who wound up being butchered andpackaged as food themselves to be sold toothers.

How this horrified me! Similar conditions,thirty thousand years in the future, horrifyDanlo nearly to the point of madness. Howcan he keep his vow of ahimsa in themiddle of such mayhem? Is it reallypossible, he wonders, to be completely non-violent? Can even the best of men andwomen be completely good – or eventrytobe? What does it mean to be a completehuman being who says yes to all things?

I make it as hard as I possibly can for Danloto say yes. In truth, I torture him. So domy other characters: the newest andpotentially greatest of the galaxy’s godsorders warrior-poets to bind Danlo in acidwire and inject a drug called ekanna into hisveins. This causes each cell of his body toburn with fire, with a hot and nearly infiniteanguish. Then the warrior-poets go to workwith their knives. Danlo should fall mad ordie from this unbearable torment. Heshould cry out in despair a total and final“No!”

Instead, lost in a black and bottomlessneverness, in the deepest tissues of his soul,he finds a secret light and begins to wakeup.

Toward the end of my long story, as Danloreturns to the wildness of his true nature, hetakes refuge in a large wood in the middleof Neverness. He builds himself a hut ofsnow – an igloo – in which to live. Fromthis crude shelter, he goes forth to the war-torn city each day to try to change theuniverse.

And then I make it still harder for him. Herediscovers his lost love, the memory-rapedTamara who does desperate things in orderto survive. He falls in love with her allover again – even as he begins to love evenmore fiercely Tamara’s gentle, beautifulson. No such boy should have to come intolife in the middle of such a desperate anddreadful war. No one should have to starve.Danlo vows to do what he must to keepboth the boy and Tamara alive.

Danlo grieves, though, because she has losther memory of him. And so how, hewonders, can she love him as she once did?Whatismemory, really, he asks himself?How does memory relate to love? Andhow – this is another riddle he must solve –how could a loving God create a such aterrible universe that not only made fullmen such as Danlo suffer impossibleagonies but also tortured innocent littleboys?

This question haunts Hanuman li Tosh. Helongs for life without injustice, suffering,disease, decrepitude and death. He longsforalife, of a different kind. He wants tocreate a better universe. That, he believes,is what human beings should do. He sees achosen few ofHomo Sapiensas godlikebeings who are that very special part of theuniverse destined to shape the universe –ultimately to master and control it. And totransform it utterly.

Some gods, such as the Silicon God, goeven further. They embody the worst traitsof billionaires and world conquerors,gobbling up everything material aroundthem. In their narcissism gone wild, theyactually dream of absorbing the universeinto themselves and becoming as God.

This desire drives the war among the gods.The intense evolutionary pressure tosurvive compels them to grow as big asmoons and whole solar systems, and to slayeach other. The Silicon God has becomebetter at this slaying than any other. In abattle lasting only seconds, in its firstphase, he has effectively destroyed Ede theGod: all that remains of him is a smalldevotionary computer not much morepowerful than one of today’s laptops. It isalmost like a toy, projecting a hologram of alittle man.

Ede – what is left of him – suffers becausehe has lost whole, huge parts of hismachine brain and the programs that ran it.He feels that he has lost some essential partof himself. The worst pain, he says, is,“Not knowing if I am reallyI. Notknowing who I really am.”

Ede, the first human being to cark hisconsciousness into a computer, has a senseof being a puppet pulled by strings. Helongs for the feel of flesh. He wants to be aman again.

Hanuman, of course, moves in the oppositedirection: he wants to pull the stringsfastened to every bit of matter in theuniverse.

Danlo takes another path altogether. He,too, wants to be a man – but atrueman suchhas never existed anywhere, in all thecosmos. He must complete his initiationinto manhood and find the answer to theriddle: How do you capture a beautiful birdwithout killing its spirit? Only in doing thiswill he find the true secret of the ElderEddas.

And so he must go deep inside himself –and far, far out into the stars – to fight hisfinal battle. He must face himself, who hereallyis. Can he say yes to all things,himself above all? For he has alwayscontained the most violent of oppositeswithin himself: good and evil, halla andshaida, the life-giving right hand and hismurderous left.

In the end, when he has gone as deep asanyone can possibly go, he understands atruth that he has always turned away from:that matter is and always will be at warwith itself. Out of this fundamental strife,however, comes evolution and creation.High in the atmosphere above Nevernessgrows a new kind of life: the shimmeringGolden Ring that might protect Danlo’sworld from the radiation of the explodingstars. Life, through an eternal war withitself, through the sheer horror of living offitself in a kind of cannibalism that neverends, grows only stronger, vaster, lovelier,ever more full of beauty and splendor.

If Danlo can say yes tothat– and to all thesickening tragedies of his life – he mightfinally realize the best part of himself. Ifnot, he will become the absolute worst.